The present invention relates generally to storage area networks, and more specifically, to managing fabric priorities across heterogeneous server platforms that use the storage area networks.
In a typical data center environment, there are numerous hosts that provide different services to different users. These hosts are often heterogeneous in that the hosts have different hardware architectures (e.g., having central processing units (CPUs) of different architectures) and/or run different operating systems (e.g., z/OS™, Windows™, UNIX™, Linux™, etc.). In some cases, these heterogeneous hosts store data for their services in separate storage devices. The heterogeneous hosts access the data in the storage devices through a network that is dedicated to provide access to the storage devices.
In some cases, a group of heterogeneous hosts share a fabric, which is a group of network forwarding elements (e.g., switches, routers, etc.) that are interconnected to provide access to the storage devices in which the heterogeneous hosts store data. That is, a fabric is communication medium through which the hosts and storage devices to exchange the data and the read/write requests.